The Intake Desk keeps your brief, and now actually sends it
For months the brief you wrote sat in the panel while the run opened on defaults. That is fixed. Here is what changes for a buyer, and where the limits still bite.
Here is a problem you may have felt without naming it. You open the Intake Desk, you set a scan brief, you fill the optional fields, you order the dates, you write two or three pointed questions for Vera. Then you drop your paper on the door and the run opens. Except it opens on defaults. Your questions are still sitting in the panel below, unread. The door promised to carry what you wrote, and it did not. This update closes that gap. The brief now rides with whatever opens the run, and the answers you type later are kept against that run and returned in their own fields. If you have used the Intake Desk and quietly concluded the brief was decorative, this is the note that changes your mind.
The brief was real, the delivery was not
The brief is the cheapest lever a buyer has. Before a single document is read, you get to tell the analyst what matters: the materiality floor below which you do not care, the date order you want events read in, the specific questions you would ask a paralegal if you had one on the desk. When that context reaches the run, the first pass comes back shaped to your problem. When it does not, you get a competent generic read and you spend the next twenty minutes steering back to the thing you already typed.
The failure was narrow and specific. Dropping paper on the door opened the run on defaults. The optional fields and the questions stayed in the panel, attached to nothing. So the fix is equally specific. The brief now travels with every path that opens a run, whether that is a drop on the door, a drop on the load panel, the demo estate, or a connector import. It also survives you leaving the page, which matters more than it sounds, because a real intake session is interrupted.
What the sign off page now remembers
The second half of this update lives on the sign off page of a run already in flight. The answers you type there are now kept against that specific run and come back in their own fields rather than as loose notes. That covers the waiver reasons you record when you accept a clause you do not love, the materiality floor, the vendor names and values you read off the paper, and the vendors you tick for a wave. Each field clears as it is saved, so you are never staring at a stale value, and the whole draft clears when the estate goes live. This is the same discipline you will recognise from the deal sign off chain, where every approver gets a brief rather than a raw file.
The practical effect is that a run stops being a single sitting. You can start reading, get pulled into a call, and come back to find your waiver reasons and ticked vendors exactly where you left them. If you have read how Vera opens as a command desk, this is the same principle applied to intake: state is held against the work, not against your tab.
How it fits the workflow you already run
Most buyers do not open a run cold. You arrive with a live question: is this renewal priced above market, does this MSA carry an auto renew you missed, which of five quotes actually clears the floor. The brief is where you encode that question so the first pass answers it. When you then move into a read across many documents, the review tables and the decode flow inherit the shape you set. If you want the fastest version of the first read, decoding a contract in a minute is the entry point, and the brief now feeds it correctly.
The estate matters here too. When the estate goes live, the draft clears, which is the right behaviour. A brief is for the run you are about to open, not a permanent setting that quietly contaminates the next unrelated deal. If you are moving contracts in from an existing system, the connector import path now carries the brief the same way a manual drop does, so your first imported run is not a blank slate. The full connector setup is documented on the migration path.
The honest limits
Two things this update does not do, and you should plan around both. First, your documents are still never held in the browser. That is a deliberate isolation choice, not an oversight, and it has a visible cost: a queue you picked in an earlier session will ask you to re-pick the folder. The brief comes back, the file handle does not. If you close the tab mid intake, budget the extra fifteen seconds to point at the folder again. We think that trade is correct, because holding your paper in the browser is exactly the exposure most buyers are trying to avoid.
Second, the brief shapes the first pass, it does not guarantee the answer you wanted. If you set a materiality floor that is too high, the run will honestly report that nothing crossed it, and that is a finding, not a failure. The brief is a lens, not a verdict. For the questions you ask by mail rather than in a run, the ten inbox agents remain the right channel, and they read against the same benchmark library, so the two paths do not contradict each other.
None of this is glamorous. It is the unglamorous work of making a promise the door already made actually true. If you set a brief and quietly stopped trusting it, open the Intake Desk again, write your two questions, and watch them arrive in the run. That is the whole update, and for a buyer who runs intake weekly, it is the difference between a tool you fight and a tool you lean on.
Fredrik has spent more than twenty years in enterprise software, with time at Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce before moving to the buy side. He structured and priced the kind of large agreements most buyers only see once or twice in a career, which taught him where the leverage sits and how far a vendor will actually move. He started VendorBenchmark to hand that knowledge to every sourcing team.
